Blurring the line between software development and operations

Tag Archives: auto scaling

If you ever had to handle a big marketing campaign on a website or a promotion on your SaaS product, you probably know that sizing your servers to handle the anticipated load is notoriously hard and costly. Typically, you need to get beefy hardware to power up a number of servers and deploy a load balancer to equally split the traffic between each server so you get a system that can handle millions of views in a small time range like hours.

If you read my post on the OperatingDev blog or the Precursor Games case study on theTriNimbus site, you know that we recently worked with Precursor Games to design and implement a scalable deployment architecture for their crowdfunding campaign. We chose to deploy the system on AWS and our aim was to ensure the servers can handle up to a million page views in the first few days. Continue reading →

A while back I wrote that crowdfunding can be a distraction to startups from working on their products. While I still believe that, one of my clients have shown me that the two can be put together to create a community of people who passionately care about your product and are investing their time and ideas (beyond the $10 or $50 or whatever amount they contribute) in helping you deliver an outstanding experience.

It is the year 2016 and Amazon is getting ready for their fifth re:Invent conference. The conference attracted a lot of attention already – after all one of the keynotes will be broadcast from aboard MV Ushuaia as Amazon is ready to launch their newest data centre, built next door to the Palmers Station on Anvers Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region. With this, they will now have data centres on all continents on our planet! (Some say they are building one under water in the Pacific too but these are only rumors for now.)

The interest for the conference has been growing since the first one in 2012 and Amazon decided this year to hold simultaneous events in several locations around the world. The audiences will follow the broadcast of the keynote from Antarctica using the latest video streaming service the AWS team plans to officially announce at the conference – AWS Cineplex – which is seriously threatening Netflix as the main provider of online movie streaming.